An inkjet recording system discharges minute ink droplets from an ink discharge port (a nozzle) of an inkjet head to a work (an object to be recorded), to thereby perform printing or image recording. Since the inkjet recording system can perform recording operations in a state of being spaced apart from works, recording on works made of various materials is possible, and thus the system is used for a wide range of applications.
In recent years, the inkjet recording system has allowed more highly precise recording than other recording systems, and thus the inkjet recording system has been adopted also in a manufacturing process of, for example, color filters, organic electro luminescence (EL) displays, and the like which are components of color liquid crystal displays used as display units for color TVs and personal computers. Furthermore, application to a manufacturing process of electronic devices, such as thin film transistors, wiring boards and micro lens, is under study.
In recording characters or images on recording medium such as paper, generally, ink of four colors: black, cyan, magenta and yellow is used, and in a manufacturing process of the display units or the like described above, ink including coloring materials of three colors: red, green and blue and luminescent material is used. Generally, the inkjet recording apparatus includes inkjet heads for each type of ink to be used.
The inkjet recording apparatus used in the manufacturing process described above often includes a plurality of inkjet heads provided for one type of ink and also includes, in some case, a few tens to a few hundreds of inkjet heads, from the viewpoint of work size enlargement and higher production efficiency. Furthermore, each inkjet head is provided with nozzles for discharging ink droplets and along with needs of highly dense and highly precise recording quality, the number of nozzles provided on one inkjet head is on the increase and is sometimes in excess of 100.
An on-demand type inkjet recording apparatus makes use of a piezoelectric element in a piezo system or a heater in a thermal system as drive means for discharging ink droplets from nozzles, but in response to the increasing number of nozzles described above, the number of driver circuit boards for drive-controlling the drive means, such as piezoelectric element or heater, also increases.
Generally, the driver circuit boards are integrally attached to inkjet heads or disposed in the vicinity to the inkjet heads. Control circuit boards for transferring recording control signals obtained from recording data to the driver circuit boards are often arranged together, separately from the inkjet heads. Accordingly, in transferring recording data from the control circuit boards to the driver circuit boards, multi-core cables are used and each of the cables from the control circuit boards is connected to a predetermined driver circuit board (refer to Patent Literature 1 and Patent Literature 2).